-
- guardian.co.uk, Sunday June 15 1997 15.50 BST
Last week, something very exciting, and possibly very tragic, happened to trilogy. This means that McGregor, a 26-year-old from Crieff, Perthshire, will play the lead in three huge-budget Hollywood films. He will be the best-known young British actor in the movies, at least as highly regarded as Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. He will be up there with Daniel Day-Lewis. (Unless, of course, it all goes horribly wrong.) This is great news for British acting, even if it is slightly less good news for actual British films.
I called McGregor's agent to arrange an interview. She wouldn't speak to me. Later, I called the woman who organises McGregor's publicity and told her I was writing about him. There was a displeased crackle on the other end of the line. She said, 'Why are you doing this?' Another awkward moment passed. 'Because he's a good actor. Because of the Star Wars part.' 'Oh.'
Then she explained the new Ewan McGregor publicity policy, which has, for the British film industry. Ewan McGregor, the Scottish actor who is most famous for his part as Mark Renton, a heroin addict in the film Trainspotting, landed the part of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the new Star Wars the last two minutes, been to to avoid publicity, in case McGregor becomes over-exposed, in case publicity about McGregor himself takes attention away from publicity about the films he is in. McGregor, I was told, wouldn't talk to me. That was a given.
Also, people he had worked with, such as Danny Boyle, who directed Trainspotting, would not talk about him. It was a concerted effort. This is a huge contrast with even the very recent past. McGregor used to give chirpy interviews all over the place. I had arrived on the scene at a precise moment, the moment that Ewan McGregor stopped being merely a good young British actor, and started being a movie star.
What this means is that, whatever Ewan McGregor has got, he is perceived to have more of it than, say, Sean Pertwee, or Sean Bean, or Rufus Sewell, or Jude Law, or Christopher Eccleston, or even Johnny Lee Miller, his co-star in Trainspotting. McGregor is, for instance, very versatile vital and attractive but not too damagingly handsome; he will not get stuck with a career as a dreamboat. Neither is he particularly tall, like Richard E. Grant, or short, like Tim Roth (he is 5ft 101/2in).
He is able to look stupid or bright, and all points between. He is someone who can lose and gain weight at will. He is not shackled by vanity. He is married with a kid. He's a good insurance prospect. He is convincing as a junkie, as an intellectual, as an ambitious hack, even as a corpse. McGregor is, to be precise, a proper actor; he is one of those actors whose face changes very slightly with every role; he holds the muscles differently. But he doesn't overdo it. The changes are subtle, and beautifully observed. When he plays a part, you can almost always tell what his character is thinking, and almost never what McGregor himself is thinking. He occupies his roles with a certain humility. He seems not to be trying to attract attention to himself.
He's not always recognisable when you first see him in a film. He does not occupy the screen with a trademark McGregor swagger. He was, if you remember, the character called Hopper in Dennis Potter's Lipstick On Your Collar, the young cockney lad with his hair slicked back. Oh yes! So he was! He was the lead in the BBC's costume drama Scarlet and Black. These, in their way, were both gems of acting; many people will have seen them and not connected them. He had a small part as a drug dealer in Blue Juice, a film which starred his friend Sean Pertwee. Then he was the journalist Alex in Danny Boyle's eye-catching Shallow Grave. His character was a greedy, rather nerdy idiot with long hair. Alex was eager, hopeful, over-confident.
And then came Trainspotting, Danny Boyle's brilliant, dangerously euphoric film about young heroin addicts in Edinburgh. McGregor played Mark Renton, the narrator; getting the job, he said, was, 'like a million birthday presents rolled into one'.
Renton is a junkie with just enough of a sense of self-preservation to attract audience identification; he is also a twisted maniac with a death wish. For the part, McGregor cut butter, milk and beer out of his diet and lost 30lbs. He had his hair cropped. His cheekbones protruded; his eye-sockets were shadowy. 'I felt really good that way,' he has said, 'really agile and nice.'
McGregor played Renton incredibly well. He needed to be an exact thing: a youthful film audience's idea of a drug addict, which is not precisely the same as a drug addict, and not the same as an actor playing the cliched part of a drug addict. There are times when most actors attempting to play Renton would be unable to resist playing a character who is slightly more intelligent, thereby getting a bigger laugh. McGregor walks the tightrope deftly. Renton must stick two suppositories up his bottom, and then make the slightly dumb joke, 'For all the good they've done me I might as well have stuck 'em up my arse.' Then he must make a pained face, showing another facet of the character. McGregor shows us the pain inside the wit, and the stupidity that underlies them both; it's a perfect piece of acting.
Did the film glamorise drug addiction? Perhaps it needed to, just a tiny bit, in order to tell its story, which is, in the end, an indictment of drugs. Still, at one point, Renton says of heroin: 'Take the best orgasm you've ever had, multiply it a thousand times, and you're still nowhere near.' McGregor fielded questions with confidence. 'Five people shooting up heroin,' he said, 'is a lot less extreme than blowing someone's face off with a gun, which people are happy to watch that's mainstream.' McGregor knew he wanted to be an actor at the age of nine. He attended Morrison's Academy, a public school in Perth, where his father was games master. But he didn't like it; he felt he didn't fit in. He wanted to be like his mother's brother, the actor Denis Lawson (best known for his role in Local Hero). 'I always remember him being different, and really interesting,' McGregor has said. 'He would be wearing big flares and sheepskin waistcoats and stuff, and beads. At that point, he was just so unlike anyone living in Crieff that I decided I wanted to be just like him.'
When McGregor was 15, he was the drummer in a school band called Scarlet Pride. He listened to the Billy Idol song 'Rebel Yell' every morning. At 16, his parents approved his decision to leave school, even though he had not passed any exams.
He went to work for Perth Repertory theatre, which he had, he says, 'hounded' since the age of 14. He took a one-year acting course in Kirkcaldy. In 1989, he entered the Guildhall School of Speech and Drama in London. He left, before graduating, to take up the offer of the part of Hopper in Lipstick On Your Collar.
Since Trainspotting, McGregor has been seen in The Pillow Book, Peter Greenaway's film about a bisexual who commits suicide and spends most of the film naked ('He has a very handsome penis,' said The Face), and Brassed Off, a story about a group of Grimethorpe miners who go on strike and play in a brass band. He has made films virtually back-to-back, and admits that his performance in Emma was one job too many.
'I was terrible in it,' he has said. 'I didn't believe a word I said.' He has just finished making The Serpent's Kiss, a film about a landscape gardener set in Gloucestershire in 1699, and The Life Less Ordinary, Danny Boyle's next film, in which he plays a Scottish drifter who kidnaps the tall, blonde, American actress Cameron Diaz.
John Battsek, who produced The Serpent's Kiss, was lukewarm about discussing his star. Yes, he agreed, dutifully intoning the usual cliches, McGregor is 'incredibly versatile', 'attractive', and 'charismatic . . . as good as anyone around' but was more interesting on McGregor's personal life. He talks about him in terms of stability and family life the actor is married to a French set designer, Eva Mavrakis, whom he met on the set of Kavanagh QC. They got married in France a few months later, and now have a baby daughter. 'He hasn't let success get the better of him,' said Battsek. 'He's very well earthed.'
McGregor has always been cynical about Hollywood, despite a guest shot in ER, and has never wanted to move there. 'It looks like the world's biggest caravan park,' he says, dubbing it 'Valium-haze LA'. He worries about the power of mainstream movies. Of Independence Day, he said, 'They should have their Equity cards removed.' As part of a consortium, he recently made a bid for lottery money to fund films of his own. What would McGregor be like as a director? We might have to wait a while for this his bid was turned down.
Now for the Star Wars trilogy. The relationship he would like with Hollywood, he says, is 'to be in, and still on the outside'. Wait till the sharks get hold of him. You may never see him as a drug addict or a bisexual again.
